It depends on the game/engine. ScummVM plays dozens (hundreds?) of games of course, but even something like OpenRA plays Dune 2000, C&C, and also Red Alert.
Projects dedicated to the preservation and modest enhancement of existing games is even more illustrative of the vague point I'm attempting to gesture towards.
I think that's just the nature of software never being done + the only reason games have been declared "done" in the past is when you had to master a single boxed release.
I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant.
You allude to the reasons why though, with the box release requirement--though that's a part of the greater economic reasons.
> I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant.
I wish that was the case because then you as the player could be done with paying for the game once. Instead, the current trend is to make games into live services that have continuous development funded with continuous revenue streams. Moch more predictable for the companies to see their revenue slowly go up or down than invest in a completely new game that might be a hit or might flop completely.
And there are a fair number of open source recreations that keep games alive like OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and OpenRCT (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
Does that really mean anything? For an open source project the "apparatus" is whatever community forms to maintain that project and yes, the community won't just decide that as a whole they are now going to create a different game. But individual contributors absolutely can and do decide that they are done with the game and move on to something else.
I beg to differ, the real beauty is how anyone can fork them to follow their own vision e.g. Open TTD has a fork with bundled community patches dating decades that never landed in the main game, or Space Station 13, a game that plays completely different depending on which codebase you play (they don't even have matching licenses anymore, and all of them copyleft).
There's even a nice talk on SS13 specifically since the project is massive and sees changed ever hour (in a single version, let alone all versions or even the multiple remakes currently in development): https://youtu.be/z5sjwqUten0
For some reason Youtube's offerings for ‘Space Station 13’ look like a supply of memery straight from elementary school, at least going by what I see in the list. I managed to find one vid by ‘MandaloreGaming’, whom I watched one time in the past and pinned as vaguely decent, but even that didn't evade the attention-deficit mode of editing.
